Shinedown band professional#

Instead, he was one of those people who always knew what he wanted to do and that was songwriting and singing.

Shinedown band professional#

Smith got through his sports phase quicker than most, finishing his dreams of being a professional athlete in his teenage years. He was the only one in his family much interested in music. “I remember the moment,” Smith says, “when I said, ‘I want to do that!’” His grandmother got him a record player in 1979 and it came with the vinyl of “Good Ol’ Boys,” the Dukes of Hazzard theme song, sung by Waylon Jennings. Smith remembers loving melody-especially that produced by singers-from the age of two years old. As he puts it, even from a very early age, he didn’t choose the music, it chose him. Smith’s own musical education began where he was born and raised: Knoxville, Tennessee.

“We’re really big fans of education and learning new things,” Smith says. Together, everyone keeps each other on their toes. But he knows he’s also making music for them. For Smith, he enjoys pushing himself mentally and creatively and he loves when he sees the crowd respond. When one exhales, the other inhales, and vice versa. The relationship between a band and its audience is always an intricate, symbiotic thing. But our biggest thing is that we only have one boss in Shinedown and that happens to be everybody in the audience.” We listen to a lot of different music, inspired by a lot of different genres. “We’re rock ‘n’ roll to the bone but we’re very much-our palate is pretty vast. “We’re constantly evolving from a musical standpoint,” he says. Why? Because he knows his audience-massive as it is-will always be changing, too. If one chooses to stay stagnant, the world will pass them by.